by Johnny Dwyer
In some regards, his assignment—to sort through the shattered pieces of the Liberian crisis to determine whether any American citizens bore any responsibility for the suffering there—was strange. Washington’s attitude toward Liberia had long been marked by indifference, inaction, and ineptitude; Liberians, on the other hand, had looked to the United States to solve problems that were uniquely theirs. But the civil war had married the two countries in a manner that a century of relative stability had not. Over the course of the 1990s, thousands of Liberian refugees had fled to New York, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Providence under temporary protected status, a designation that recognized their unique need for haven during the crisis.6 Those who arrived could be counted as fortunate. Hundreds of thousands of others remained behind in sprawling refugee camps in Guinea and Ghana, waiting to be resettled in any Western nation that would take them.
The name “Charles Taylor” loomed large in all the research Baechtle had been provided. Taylor had long thrived in an impunity gap, where neither the laws of his own nation nor those of the international community could touch him. Even after he had been pushed from power, he and his followers were indignant at the accusations levied against him. What was the crime? Where was the evidence? Had he ever been convicted in a court of law?
The answer was simple: Taylor’s wars had destroyed nearly all mechanisms of accountability in Liberia. The nation’s legal institutions had collapsed during the civil war; the brightest legal minds had fled the country or been forced to the periphery of political life. After the Special Court in Freetown indicted Taylor, it appeared he’d remain comfortably out of reach in his exile. Meanwhile his isolation proved something of a success for U.S. policy makers, the culmination of a two-year campaign by State Department officials to marginalize him.
Yet as Taylor settled into exile in Nigeria, and as Liberia found an uneasy peace, the deposed leader remained a threat to U.S. interests in the region. He enjoyed considerable support in Liberia, particularly among an entire generation of recently disarmed combatants. His ex-wife quietly assumed a place in the country’s legislature. As many continued to feel his influence over affairs within the country, it seemed a distinct possibility he would keep his promise to return to Liberia.
What was at stake in Liberia for the United States? Officially, the government would cite “regional security.” Taylor’s continued freedom was clearly incompatible with this goal. He and his inner circle, however, read darkly into American motives: the United States wanted Liberia’s resources—not just its rubber and iron ore, which were known quantities, but its yet-to-be-discovered oil, which they believed lay offshore in the Gulf of Guinea. In either case, the White House’s executive order directly targeted Taylor and the threat he posed.
Still, Taylor could never be Baechtle’s target. Federal statutes clearly spelled out the rules of engagement for his investigation: he could pursue American citizens regardless of where they had committed a crime, or he could pursue foreign nationals who had entered the United States. A typical ASTI case involved an individual or a company located in the United States that was attempting to sell weapons or technology to another country, whether that meant assault rifles for a Colombian drug organization or nuclear detonators for engineers in nations trying to develop the bomb. Taylor had clearly and repeatedly violated UN sanctions with multiple parties, but ICE had no clear jurisdictional claim in any of these cases; the weapons hadn’t passed through the United States, and Taylor was not American.
Other countries had undertaken cases involving timber-, diamond-, and arms-trafficking violations in Liberia. Italy attempted to prosecute Leonid Minin for trading in conflict diamonds and timber following his 2001 arrest near Milan. That prosecution was made possible only by the fact that Minin had entered Italy. Nonetheless, the court found that since none of the contraband transited through Italy, it had no jurisdiction. Minin received a two-year sentence for narcotics offenses and disappeared soon after his release. Meanwhile Dutch officials began targeting one of their own citizens, Gus Kouwenhoven, who had operated a hotel in Monrovia and a timber company in the bush before fleeing Liberia in 2003. Both Greenpeace and Global Witness had linked Kouwenhoven not only to the trade in timber in Liberia, in violation of UN sanctions, but also to providing weapons to Taylor’s forces.
There was no corollary target for Baechtle and the United States. While a few American businessmen had tried their hand in Taylor’s Liberia, none graduated to the president’s inner circle. But in the tangle of material before Baechtle, there were two references that could be easily overlooked. Deep in a report by UN experts, there was a curious mention:
Leonid Minin also stated that the son of President Taylor, Charles “Chucky” Taylor (Jr.) had tried to become part of some of these arms transactions, in order to collect commissions. Another business partner of Leonid Minin, a Finnish national with companies in Turkey and Switzerland, had dealt with Charles Taylor Jr. and documents found in Minin’s possession show that this individual was sending documentation on different types of equipment to Minin.7
Then, in a separate report, Chucky and Minin were linked in an ammunition shipment originating in Ukraine. “The final delivery to Liberia was arranged between the military at Abidjan airport, Sanjivan Ruprah, Mohamed Salamé and Charles Taylor Jr. Minin said a special plane was organized from Monrovia to pick up the ammunition,” according to a report by UN investigators. The name “Chucky Taylor” was one strand among many to follow. Taylor had nearly a dozen children, and the reporting on Chucky was scant. But Baechtle thought that, if anything, Chucky might be a potential source for information to further his investigation.
His focus remained on arms and trying to determine whether a violation of U.S. law had occurred in any of the weapons transactions that kept the civil war in Liberia going. The UN Panel of Experts and NGOs like Global Witness and Amnesty International had reported extensively on weapons trafficking and sanctions busting in Liberia, but this work had not produced relevant evidence of any crimes.
The concerns of the human rights investigators differed from Baechtle’s; NGOs worked primarily to generate publicity and political pressure. Law enforcement agencies, however, needed to focus on specific elements of a crime. Moreover, they were not at liberty to discuss the status of any investigation without authorization. Federal agents like Baechtle thus maintained cordial but not particularly close relationships with independent investigators and researchers, who eagerly submitted reports and facilitated contacts with potential witnesses.8 In this case, the third-party reporting on Taylor’s rise to power filled in the historical record on Liberia, but none of it identified a specific target that he could hope to put in front of a grand jury.
Charles Taylor’s rule over Liberia had generated not only a decade of instability but also more loose ends than could be accounted for. As the Taylor government spun out, it jettisoned individuals from its orbit and with them the secrets they held. Taylor’s castoffs would often land in the hands of foreign diplomats, NGOs, and intelligence and law enforcement agencies. ICE worked with the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Department of Justice to assemble a roster of contacts who could provide context and background on Liberia and Taylor’s government.
Two individuals eventually came to light: Hassan Bility and Brig. Gen. John S. Tarnue.9 Both men were Liberian exiles who entered the United States in 2003 and 2001, respectively. Hassan Bility had worked as an editor at the Monrovia weekly newspaper The Analyst and, according to critics, was a former spokesmen for an anti-Taylor rebel faction.10 General Tarnue had served as a commander first in the Armed Forces of Liberia, then within Taylor’s militia.11 While both men had spent much of their lives in Liberia at opposite ends of the conflict, they shared the experience of falling out with Taylor.
One strand in particular connected the men: both alleged that the ATU had physically brutalized them, and both had eventually fled Liberia. The men provided investigators with testi
mony in the case involving Gus Kouwenhoven, the Dutch timber baron, who was later charged in the Netherlands for aiding Taylor’s war machine.12 Kouwenhoven was convicted of arms smuggling in 2006, only to see his case overturned in 2008; in 2010 judges ordered that he be tried again, but the case remains pending. The two men also offered evidence of Taylor’s involvement with rebel leaders who were being prosecuted by the Special Court in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Even though Tarnue was an American-trained military officer, he had served at Taylor’s side from the earliest days of the civil war, before coming under suspicion by Taylor.13 His crime, he says, was that he had cooperated on security measures with officials in the U.S. embassy in Monrovia. His own soldiers eventually arrested him and incarcerated him behind the Executive Mansion. The treatment he received there was similar to what Nathaniel Koah and Kougbay Dunuma had endured: he was beaten and stabbed by ATU fighters. Eventually he was located in a hospital in Ghana by Dr. Alan White, a former Pentagon official acting as the chief investigator for the Special Court, where the Liberian general was receiving medical care. Realizing Tarnue’s potential value as a witness, White spirited him out of West Africa to the United States; he was permitted to bring his family with him.
Bility had been arrested many times in the course of his career, but in June 2002 he was detained a final time in Taylor’s Liberia.14 He was confronted by plainclothes security officers as he stepped from his downtown Monrovia office with his four-year-old son to buy popcorn. He was brought to Taylor, who accused the editor of plotting to overthrow his government. Taylor’s forces disappeared Bility for nearly six months, detaining him in secret facilities around the country, in filthy conditions with a string of other prisoners. Taylor, always keen to the political moment, referred to Bility and the others using the Bush administration’s favored term “enemy combatants.”
Among the “enemy combatants” with whom Bility was imprisoned in Liberia was the student activist Varmuyan Dulleh, who had been arrested and tortured by Benjamin Yeaten and Chucky in July 2002.15 Dulleh had been brought to a hole at Kle Junction, outside Monrovia, where Bility and other men were being held. Arriving with injuries over his body, he recounted, still terrified from the experience, how he’d been tortured and interrogated by Taylor, Yeaten, and Chucky. Bility knew Dulleh from childhood but could do little to help him. The men were eventually separated, after the U.S. embassy publicly pushed for Bility’s release while the Taylor government held him. As a journalist, he arrived in the United States to something of a hero’s welcome—earning recognition from the Press Union of Liberia and Amnesty International. Tarnue’s arrival, as a regime insider, was a more delicate transaction.
Both men had resettled in the United States: Bility outside Boston and Tarnue in Baltimore. After landing in the United States, both were eventually put in touch with Baechtle. Baechtle acknowledges that around this time, while conducting background interviews related to his arms-trafficking investigation, he met with a Liberian who had recently relocated to the United States, though he could not disclose whether this man was Bility or Tarnue. During the course of the interview, Baechtle asked the individual “Why are you in the United States?” The source recounted the ordeal that had forced him to flee Liberia, offering as an aside that he’d been tortured by Taylor’s son Chucky. (Bility said he did not provide this initial tip to Baechtle.) On its face this was an unremarkable charge. Allegations of human rights violations were almost the norm in Taylor’s Liberia and a recurring theme in refugee claims. The charges were not central to ASTI’s focus, and Baechtle filed the accusation away in his memory.
Yet he was working within an agency that had a strong tradition of pursuing human rights violations. In the 1970s the service had been given the authority to pursue former Nazis in the United States. One such case involved Anton Baumann, a carpenter who had lived quietly in Milwaukee for nearly a half century; an INS investigation implicated him as a former SS guard at a concentration camp and resulted in his deportation in 1991. During the 1990s the focus shifted to investigating more recent crimes against humanity. The INS targeted immigrants arriving from the Balkans, Central America, and Africa who might have committed human rights violations, such as Juan Angel Hernández-Lara, a former member of Battalion 3-16, a CIA-trained Honduran military unit accused of killing nearly two hundred leftists.16 Hernández-Lara settled in West Palm Beach, Florida, before being discovered and pleading guilty to immigration charges that resulted in his deportation.
After the formation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Department of Homeland Security, Assistant Secretary Michael J. Garcia pushed the mission of seeking out human rights violators.17 In 2003 he created a unit within the Office of Investigation called the Human Rights Violators and Public Safety Unit, as well as a specialized unit of attorneys called the Human Rights Law Division. The unit pursued historical crimes like the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995 and the ethnic cleansing of Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, where individuals implicated in the violence had sought haven within the United States.
But Baechtle had come to ICE through U.S. Customs. His training did not explicitly cover how to investigate human rights crimes; nor had he received specific training in how to interview victims of violent crime. As he began to interview individuals who had emerged from Taylor’s Liberia, it became clear that many were just that: survivors of trauma perpetrated by criminal security forces. He felt compassion for these people, but he eventually returned to the allegations that Taylor’s son had participated in weapons transactions, hoping to find an American connection. This accusation had been introduced in the reporting from the UN Panel of Experts in 2001. Italian prosecutors had also uncovered reams of documents implicating the younger Taylor with Leonid Minin, but as we have seen, their case had evaporated for lack of jurisdiction, and Minin disappeared soon afterward. Chucky Taylor remained a dangling thread in all this.
Baechtle still knew very little about him. Chucky carried a notorious reputation among Liberians, but it was not substantiated by detailed public reporting. Baechtle began to hear about random assaults and acts of violence against women carried out by Chucky and his bodyguards from the Liberians he interviewed, behavior that mapped to the prototypical characteristics of a dictator’s son: decadent, violent, and unaccountable. But it was difficult to sort truth from fiction. Even the UN travel ban on Liberia was surprisingly vague on Taylor Jr.; it listed no date of birth or nationality, just that he was an “associate, adviser and son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor with ongoing ties to him.”
There was some intelligence on Taylor Jr. developed by other U.S. agencies. The CIA had reported on his presence in Liberia (but has declined to declassify its findings).18 As early as 1995, diplomats in Monrovia also noted him. A 1995 cable between the U.S. embassies in Monrovia and Ouagadougou, with the subject line “Taylor’s Domestic Affairs,” says, “Taylor has a son, Chucky, Junior who is 19-20 years old, we believe by an American citizen now resident in Florida.”19
Amid confusing accounting of Taylor’s wives and children, the reference did not appear entirely out of place. But for Baechtle, there was something crucial in this cable. The fact that Taylor Jr. had been born to an American citizen held the potential to change everything. That wouldn’t necessarily give him a target or a crime, but it could yield something his investigation needed to move forward: an American connection to Liberia.
Earlier in that spring of 2005, the name “Charles Taylor Jr.” began cropping up in cable traffic between State Department headquarters and embassies in Monrovia, Jakarta, Lomé, Beirut, and Port of Spain.20 Much of the discussion concerned former officials of Charles Taylor’s government sanctioned under the UN travel ban. In tandem, the United States had moved against Taylor insiders, placing them on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list, prohibiting U.S. citizens and companies from transacting with those subject to U.S. sanctions. Unlike most of the Taylor insiders included on the OFAC list, Chu
cky’s personal information was limited. His name appeared misspelled as “Chuckie” with no passport number and, beyond his date of birth, little other identifying information. Yet the OFAC designation strung up Chucky’s life and livelihood perhaps more than any of the other insiders, because it isolated him financially from his family in the United States.
Various parts of the federal government began to stitch together some of the pieces of his identity and picked up on Chucky’s trail. While he had been in touch with the Monrovia embassy a year earlier, the State Department sought confirmation of his whereabouts. “The Department would appreciate receiving information from Embassy Port of Spain on whether Taylor is, indeed, resident in Trinidad, and, if so, information on his current activities,” one cable requested.21 The embassy in Port of Spain approached Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Counter Drug-Crime Task Force, and the Central Bank’s inspector to find further information on him, but reported that “these sources are unable to ascertain the whereabouts or the financial records of Charles Taylor, Jr., who reportedly resides in Trinidad.”
Port of Spain reported back a surprising detail to Washington. “Post understands that Charles Taylor, Jr. may be an American citizen by birth,” a cable noted, asking for “guidance before proceeding further.”22